The Girl Scouts Deserve A High-Five For Standing With Trans Girls And Sending Back This $100k Donation
Even before I had any children, I sort of hoped I’d have a daughter so she could join the Girl Scouts someday, if she wanted. At the time, those dreams were mainly cookie motivated. I could never find Girl Scout cookies where I lived, so I figured I’d just make my own Girl Scout and then I would always know when it was cookie time. But the Girl Scouts are actually an amazing organization even without the cookies, and now they deserve a standing ovation for turning down a massive donation that came with some transphobic strings attached.
According to The Advocate, last month the Girl Scouts of Western Washington received a $100,000 donation from a giver whose identity has not been revealed. Girl Scout leaders were thrilled. $100,000 is about a quarter of their annual fundraising goal, and it would have enabled them to send 500 girls to camp. But then, after the generous gift had been accepted, the donor sent along Girl Scouts of Western Washington CEO Megan Ferland a follow-up demand: “Please guarantee that our gift will not be used to support transgender girls. If you can’t, please return the money.”
So Ferland did exactly that. She said she was “very sad” about receiving the letter, but she wrote back to the donor saying that the $100,000 would be returned.
“Girl Scouts is for every girl,” Ferland said. “And every girl should have the opportunity to become a Girl Scout if she wants to.”
Ferland and the Girl Scouts of Western Washington deserve a million high-fives for choosing to stand with transgender girls over a big chunk of money with some bigoted strings attached. But $100,000 is a lot of money, and in an attempt to recoup some of it, they started an IndieGoGo fundraising campaign that explained how the original $100,000 was lost and why they would not be excluding any girls from joining.
It was an enormous success. The campaign raised $100,000 in a single day, and now, just two days in, it has nearly $250,000.
Ferland has refused to identify the original donor out of respect for his or her privacy, but I hope that person is watching all this and knows that his or her anti-trans demands led directly to even more support for transgender girls.
